Tag: songs about breaking up

Listen to this track by London-based hit-single generating vocal group All Saints. It’s “Never Ever”, their smash 1997 single as taken from their self-titled album All Saints, their debut full-length. The group had been together since 1993, led by members Melanie Blatt and Shaznay Lewis, along with former member Simone Rainford, after serving as back-up vocalists for ZTT recording studios. With this song, and with then-new members in Canadian sisters Nicole and Natalie Appleton joining them, they managed to score a number one single that would eventually become the second best selling single by a British girl group, just behind The Spice Girls “Wannabe”.

Like their spicy contemporaries, All Saints (named after a road in London) sought to appeal to a pure pop audience with a decidedly R&B flavour. With the kind of hooks their material featured, they were certainly able to get the attention of commercial radio, although perhaps with a bit less cultural impact than The Spice Girls initially. But one thing that All Saints had was an instinct for writing their own material. Shaznay Lewis wrote this song with writers Robert Jazayeri and Sean Mather. “Never Ever” was released in Britain in November of 1997, becoming a smash hit and remaining to be their biggest charting single to date with scores of accolades attached to it.

But like many hit songs, it was based in some very real struggles, specifically on Lewis’ part. Its success and its positive impact on the group struck her as ironic, rooted as it was in the pain of a real break-up. Beyond its undeniable commercial value and appealing pop hooks, there is a lot of darkness swimming below the surface that brings out some pertinent questions about break ups, and how they can very often skew our perceptions of ourselves. Read more

Listen to this song by cut-and-paste irony merchant and heartfelt singer-songwriter all in one, Beck. It’s “Guess I’m Doing Fine”, a single as taken from his 2002 album Sea Change, his seventh. The album’s title can be taken in a few ways, with one being the impression that Beck had embraced a new level of candour in terms of subject matter and perspective. This may be due to the fact that the album was released during a period of upheaval for its creator.

This song is one of many that documents the break-up of a relationship, with a requirement for the narrator in each song to confront the associated emotional turbulence before moving beyond it and starting a new chapter for himself. Sea change indeed, then. Evidently, Beck was apprehensive about revealing the depths of his feelings around these kinds of themes, given that he’d personally broken up with his partner of nine years around the time this album was released. He wanted to avoid self-indulgence, and capturing his own misery in amber. Eventually though, it occurred to him that songs about break-ups are legion because the pain associated with the end of a relationship is universal to the human experience. Why not write about it?

As a result, this song goes beyond any one personal story and opens things up in the material for an audience. This resulted in some pretty solid reviews. And there are still some eyebrow-arching lines in there that are true to their writer’s M.O to boot.Read more

Listen to this track by supremely gifted American pop song artisan and singer-songwriter in her own right Carole King. It’s “It’s Too Late”, a smash single coupled with another song, “I Feel The Earth Move”, as a double A-side, and featured on her classic 1971 record Tapestry. The song was co-written with lyricist Toni Stern, who penned the words after a break-up with a mutual friend of King’s, fellow singer-songwriter James Taylor.

Carole King herself had written for many other artists from Bobby Vee, to The Chiffons, to The Monkees, a role that took up quite a bit of her time from the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s after only a few solo singles under her own name by the beginning of that decade. By then, she’d evolved considerably as a writer and performer. “It’s Too Late” reflects a more mature perspective on the end of a relationship compared to many of the break-up songs she’d written in the previous decade. It adds a level of musical sophistication too, with jazz-inflected guitar and soprano sax adding additional voices to King’s resigned lead vocal and lush piano lines.

But very importantly, it’s also a key song that comes from a woman’s point of view during a time when certain social changes were only just beginning to make their way into the broader cultural conversation. Read more

Listen to this track by former Everything But The Girl vocalist, singer-songwriter, and columnist Tracey Thorn. It’s “Oh! The Divorces”, the lead track off of her 2010 solo record Love And Its Opposite. That record was the second release of the century from Thorn, preceded by 2007’s Out Of The Woods, and representative of a new phase in her career as a singer and songwriter.

By this time, she’d spent a decade raising her kids with her partner Ben Watt, also formerly of EBTG and an active solo artist in his own right. She’d given up touring as a live performer by 2000, a part of her career that she’d never really enjoyed fully, and embraced a new avenue of expression through her regular column Off The Record in The New Statesman and as a writer of books. Yet her pursuits as a singer remained. And what a singer! For an artist known for her appealingly unadorned voice, I think a mistake that’s easily made with Thorn is to link her songwriting to that same approach, to assume that she’s always telling her own literal story when she sings.

This dynamic plays into an area that has forever fascinated and befuddled many a music writer, critic, and casual listener; the difference between what a singer expresses in song, and what that same singer really thinks, feels, and directly experiences in their private lives. With this tune, there are a number of elements to throw us off of the trail between the meaning of the song, and its effects on us as listeners.

Listen to this track by jangly Wolverhampton post-punk guitar pop representatives The Mighty Lemon Drops. It’s “Inside Out”, a bona fide alternative pop hit as taken from their 1988 album World Without End. The song scored placements on UK and North American charts, mostly championed on this side of the Atlantic by college radio.

The words “Bunnymen” and “Echo and the” were commonly used to describe this band in any given write up about them, now including this one. There are many sonic similarities to help justify their use, maybe. But that’s not the whole story with this band as you listen, particularly with this song which share some of the same musical ties to sixties influences as matched with post-punk ones melodically speaking. Yet they seem to escape the dourness (and Doors references) that I personally associate with Ian McCullouch and his lagomorphic fellows.

These guys made an impact outside of that comparison anyway. After forming in Wolverhampton in 1985, The Mighty Lemon Drops managed to make their mark early on with their inclusion on the C86 compilation, an important document of the era for indie-pop in Britain by the mid-eighties. They had another advantage that carried them past all that, of course; a way with an empathetic anthem. Read more

Listen to this track by beloved Canadian singer-songwriter and Orillia Ontario favourite son, Gordon Lightfoot. It’s “Carefree Highway”, an international hit as taken from his 1974 album Sundown. This song was one of several in his catalogue that scored a top ten placement on the US Billboard Hot 100. Otherwise, this song made the easy listening charts and the country charts in his home country of Canada, where he’d become rightly held as a national treasure.

Like Bob Dylan, Lightfoot was managed by Albert Grossman during the 1960s, and was on many of the same scenes. During that time his material was covered by many, including Elvis Presley, Marty Robbins, Judy Collins, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, among others. By the early 1970s and after defecting from United Artists to Warner Brothers, Gordon Lightfoot settled into a sound of his own that mixed acoustic folk-rock with a smooth country feel, along with a dash of sorrowful strings for good measure that gave his output a heavy shot of melancholy. The period between 1970 and 1978 is looked upon by many as his golden period that had him enjoying massive exposure on Canadian radio across the dial. For all of his ubiquity, it was easy to take him for granted.

On “Carefree Highway”, it was also easy to miss what lay beneath his gentle, made for radio play, and easy on the ears sound, to wit; an ocean of bittersweetness, much of that fueled by what seemed to be personal regret, not to mention the songwriting savvy it took to deliver it so poignantly to listeners. Read more

Listen to this track by James Dean-meets-Sinatra-meets-Bix-Beiderbecke jazz amalgam and legend in his own right Chet Baker. It’s “Almost Blue”, a latter-day standard for Baker as featured prominently in the film Let’s Get Lost and also featured on the live album Chet Baker Live In Tokyo, recorded in 1987 and released posthumously the next year.

That movie was a documentary about Baker, who had risen in prominence in the fifties, initially in his associations with baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, and with the West Coast jazz scene in general. But, Baker had also played with east coast musicians, too, including Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. Baker had even caught the eye of the movie industry, thanks to his almost supernatural good looks. In addition to all of that, Baker was a gifted trumpeter, and hauntingly nuanced vocalist. He was known for his melancholic tone with both voice and instrument, making his name by playing standards that were tinged with tragedy; “You Don’t Know What Love Is”, “The Thrill Is Gone”, and “I Get Along Without You Very Well”, being prime examples.

Maybe that’s why this tune, written by Elvis Costello with Chet Baker in mind, fit so well into his musical wheelhouse, eventually becoming a stalwart concert favourite during the last phase of his career. Yet, the theme of dissatisfaction and loss seemed to go beyond the material. Baker seems to embody it, and for good reason. By the eighties, Baker had seen it all. To many, it was a miracle that he would be able to tell about it, probably including Chet Baker. Read more

Listen to this song by unabashedly pop singer-songwriter Marshall Crenshaw. It’s the lead track off of his 1982 self-titled debut Marshall Crenshaw – “There She Goes Again”, which is possibly the most optimistic and well-adjusted break-up song ever written.

If you imagine that Elvis Costello or Graham Parker had sunnier dispositions, you might also imagine that they might sound a little like Marshall Crenshaw, who penned the songs on his first album as a means of making a pure pop record that made people feel good. Where the brilliance of Costello’s My Aim is True and Parker’s Howling Wind as debut albums can’t be denied, Crenshaw’s debut let’s the sun shine in while drawing on very similar influences.

Perhaps it’s Crenshaw’s American ‘can do’ attitude. Or maybe he was still reeling from having played the part of John Lennon in the first off-broadway run of the stage show Beatlemania before he cut his record. Still, whatever the reason, the album and particularly this song, lays out an optimistic worldview while at the same time avoiding patronizing his audience with lyrical platitudes.

This is my favourite Crenshaw tune. It’s the tale of a guy thrown over by a former love, yet completely without the self-pity that often goes along with it in pop songs. The guy is still in love with her. Yet he knows that she will never be happy with him, searching as she is for something he can’t give her. So he wishes her well, and let’s her go without malice. You’d think that there’d be little drama in a tale like that. But there’s still a struggle to get over her, watching her chase her empty dreams with ‘another guy’. Where a lesser tune might heep feelings of misery upon the narrator, Crenshaw turns this expectation on its head. Because he loves her, he’s sad that she can’t find happiness.

Apart from all of that is the tune, which often gets stuck in my head, as do many tunes off of this album which draws from Buddy Holly (whom he would portray in the 1987 movieLa Bamba) and the early Beatles as main influences. Plus, Crenshaw pulls off a storming version of Arthur Alexander’s ‘Soldier of Love’ from 1962, which couldn’t have been viewed as a commercial move even back in 1982. Yet, Crenshaw would follow his own path from this point forward, never really finding a place in the A-list pop-rock pantheon, yet still remaining a respected figure as a classic guitar-pop songwriter among a tight circle of devoted fans.

Here’s a clip of Newcastle roots-rockers Dire Straits performing their 1980 song, “Romeo & Juliet”, possibly one of the most heartbreaking “dealing-with-the-end-of-a-relationship” songs ever written, appearing on their Making Moviesalbum.

Mark Knopfler, lead singer and guitarist in Dire Straits

This is a song which perhaps should have been a part of my 10 break-up songs article, just because I think it hits an important aspect of that painful process. In this song, the speaker was once a partner in one of those relationships you see that seem to exemplify what it is to be in love. The two people seemed destined to be together, the stars having aligned to bring them together. Yet, when things go sour, something happens which seems to occur in a lot of relationships – some revisionist history takes place for one lover while the other lover clings to the history being revised.

On one side, the undying love once professed turns into a half-remembered episode at best (“Oh Romeo, yeah. You know I used to have a scene with him…”). On the other, there is an inability to move on (“All I do is miss you, and the way we used to be…”). Totally heartbreaking, and yet this is no syrupy tale designed to push emotional buttons. For me, this seems as real as some of my own experiences with this uglier side of love – love gone wrong.

The fact is, people deal with the ends of relationships in different ways. Some do revise their past as a means of moving on, and of protecting themselves too. Others get stuck in the mud, and can’t get themselves out. I think this tale is one for the latter, and it’s so poignantly stated, with such respect for a painful subject, that it becomes something beyond the standard pop song about breaking-up. For me personally, there’s something about it that is flesh-and-blood real. One time, I played a version of this myself at a company picnic, and I choked up at the “All I do is miss you…” line. In that moment, the line hit me, and became as real as anything I’d ever felt myself. I had to catch myself, and keep going before anyone noticed I’d been moved. How embarrassing! Never again. But, that’s good songwriting.

Mark Knopfler and his band have taken a lot of knocks for their back-to-basics sound, and of the slickness of their records. In the middle of punk and new wave, these guys were the antithesis. Their sound is rooted in a sort pristine take on country-rock, with Knopler’s voice suggesting a sort of mellowed out Dylan. Actually, Knopfler worked with Bob Dylan on both 1979’s Slow Train Coming as well as on the 1983 disc, Infidels. This was simply unfashionable at the time since Dylan was so thoroughly associated with rock’s old guard. And Knopler’s fluid, country-influenced guitar playing stood in contrast to the more angular, abrasive sounds made on the instrument at the time by many of his peers. Further to that, the band’s Brothers in Arms album in 1985 was among the first to be sold in the compact disc format, making it inescapable for a long, long time. And familiarity bred contempt for many, including to some extent myself. And of course, there’s the headband issue… Yet, Knopfler’s songwriting talent is undeniable, and this song is one of the jewels of his career.

Love – it’s an untamed beast. And in popular song, it’s often downright ferocious.

As the pop song poet Neil Sedaka once said, ‘breaking up is hard to do’. But it seems it’s actually pretty common anyway; common enough for a lot of songwriters to capture the many facets, feelings, and consequences of the end of love from the early days of tin pan alley to this modern age of ours. And despite the era, it seems that human reactions to break-ups haven’t really changed. There are still a number of attitudes expressed in pop songs about what it is to see love die. Some love affairs end and it’s for the best, with both parties knowing that even though the end of a relationship is always sad, that it ultimately makes the most sense for everyone in the long run. Some end with a real sense of tragedy, that the love gone wrong was a misstep of destiny, or a belated insight about how to keep love alive. Some lovers put on a brave face. Some drown in their own tears, as another poet called Ray Charles once wrote. Some leave callously. Others are left in the dirt.

Whatever the reaction, break-ups are universal – most people have experienced the heartache, or the relief, and sometimes both, of a relationship ending. Here are 10 songs that talk about it, from cordial goodbyes, to pleas of the desperate, to the taunts of the non-committed. Whatever the point-of-view, it’s often pretty easy to see our own lives, our own experiences, reflected in the garden variety break-up song.

The best possible break-up is the one where it really is ‘a mutual thing’. And the king-bee anthem to this kind of bust-up has got to be the Gershwin’s ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’, a song written in 1937 and recorded by artists ranging from Fred Astaire (from the movie Shall We Dance – see the clip) to Frank Sinatra to Robbie Williams. This is the most civilized break-up tune you’re ever likely to find, with the narrator celebrating what defined love while it was alive, instead of wallowing in the misery caused by its passing. In this, it is more poignant than any song that talks about ‘not being able to live without you’ or ‘I’m nothing without your love’ etc. It is the best of all things when one considers the magnitude of love; it is bittersweet, and reverent of love’s complexities.

As I’ve said in other post, my favourite version of the song is by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong on their 1957 Ella & Louis album. This tune was born to be a duet , sung by two former lovers who have nothing but good memories of what they shared together. If we’re not lucky enough to find love to last us for the rest of our lives, then this is the best anyone could otherwise hope for.

One thing that people always think of when news of a break-up is given is how it will affect the kids. In this tune by Chuck Berry, a man tries to desperately return a call from a girl called Marie who lives in the titular town. We don’t get to find out who Marie is until the end – a six-year old girl, whose “happy home was torn apart because”, as the narrator explains, “her mum would not agree.” When I think that this song was written at a time when broken homes were fairly rare, and even more rarely discussed, I marvel at Chuck’s imagination. He positioned the typical break-up song not from the point of view of an unmarried teenager (which was his usual approach), but from the position of a divorced father, trying to adjust to being apart from his child.

In some ways, it was a brave move to talk about something other than cars, girls, and no school. This was social comment about one of the most heartbreaking aspects of a break-up; the injury of the innocent who can’t understand why Mum and Dad aren’t together anymore. This situation makes the break-up more than just about two people. It’s about entire families who feel the brunt of it. Who knew that duck-walking Chuck Berry had it in him to speak so eloquently, yet succinctly, about it?

Sometimes when a break up has happened, people try to put a brave face on in order to cover up just how miserable they are. In Smokey Robinson’s ‘Tears of a Clown’, the narrator does one better – he’s downright jubilant , while inside he’s tortured. Maybe this is a guy thing, that it just doesn’t do to let people know just how crushed one is, and how vulnerable. And I think because of Smokey’s keening falsetto, he carries this idea off better than most; a seemingly happy guy who is suffering somehow make that suffering even more profound.

Like so many Motown hits, underneath the sugary surface, there lurks a lot of pain. In many ways, this song and the other Smokey single which preceded it, ‘The Tracks of My Tears’, is a standard by which a lot of pop songs like this are written; that they are empathetic with the range of emotions which go along with everyday life. Tales of happiness and joy are alright in their place, but it is interesting that tales of emotional dishonesty in the face of loss connect with so many in a more enduring way.

Some of the most heartbreaking break up songs are not the ones which describe the depths of pain in detail, but rather the ones which are focused on what comes after, the replaying of the past which goes on that talks about what could have been. Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks album covers this theme across a number of songs. This is popularly known as Bob’s ‘divorce album’, although Dylan himself has caused this assumption to be questioned, as is his custom when absolutes are placed upon his work. But whether or not the song is autobiographical or not, ‘If You See Her, Say Hello’ wins the gold for most heartbreaking, song on the record, which is saying something when considering the competition. In this song, we get a new point of view still, the voice of a man so disconnected from his former love, that she never makes an appearance. She’s just a ghost trail to the memories of a former life. ‘She might be in Tangiers‘, says the opening lines, which succinctly puts the intimacy of love into context with a separation; those once close now separated by vagueness as much as by oceans and continents.

Maybe one of the most heartbreaking aspects of the song is that the narrator realizes what has caused the dissolution of the relationship only now, when his former love is long gone, becoming a little more than a disembodied name, one he hears as he ‘roams from town to town’. Only now does he realize what he contributed to the ending of his relationship, and that his love was right to leave despite remembrances of the night he ‘tried to make her stay’ . In fact, he finds that he always has ‘respected her, for doing what she did and getting free’. The knowledge of this makes this song no sunnier. And this is its power, I think; that knowledge and insight often comes too late, which is the real tragedy in most relationships.

The annoying thing about break-ups is that they’re so intrusive. You can’t go to the places you used to go, hear that song, see that movie, enjoy that memory, without the knowledge that you once shared those things with someone else. This song talks about how the pain of a break-up can invade every aspect of one’s life, and that the broken connections between one person and another are often felt the most painfully in the mundane details of daily living. This song was written in the early 1960s by Burt Bacharach and Hall David, and has since been recorded by the likes of Dionne Warwick who had a hit with it in 1967, R.B Greaves in 1970, and Sandie Shaw in 1985.

My favourite version is the one by Naked Eyes in 1982, their sole North American hit. I remember first hearing it at a school dance. I heard it on the radio again much later, but it was the Greaves version and I remember thinking, ‘that sounds like that Naked Eyes song, only old!’. I had yet to discover how old the tune was. There was a whole range of break-up songs to discover, I found, many of which were written decades before I was born. It seemed that the emotions attached to them, the magnitude of the loss of love, would be the same no matter which era it came out of.

“I think we should just be friends” may be one of the most debilitating sentences (in two senses of the word sentence…) in the English language. Many of us know that being dumped is no fun. But it’s the dealing with the imbalance of it long afterwards which is the hard part; loving someone who no longer loves you, and having to settle for friendship, or the pretense of friendship, as a result. One of my favourite songs which opens up this idea best is ABC’s “All of My Heart”, which was an anthem for the 80s sensitive guy, who knows that he can no longer slough off his feelings of pain over being left behind with feelings of love for someone who doesn’t, and possibly never did, share them. And he can’t win anything back by thinking that’s it’s all for the best, ‘a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow.’

One thing that comes across is the line ‘the kindest cut’s the cruelest part’. The idea of letting someone down easy by offering friendship seems to be a myth for the most part. And in this song, this kind of kindness is still a ‘cut’, which seems to show that unrequited love still sucks, no matter how you handle it. And also, the song is a reminder that the risk of loving someone doesn’t often pay out. Sometimes, you put everything you’ve got on the table, and you get taken. The dark side of love that makes the contrasting rewards all the more glorious is of little comfort here.

Sometimes you just have to get out. Escaping abuse and all of the psychological implications and influences that go along with it is a drawn out process for some, but there comes a time when what is needed is a cheap hotel, a refuge, a place to go to reboot one’s life and start again. More importantly, there is a need to get to a place when one realizes that one is never really trapped in a relationship other than by traps of one’s own making. Ron Sexsmith’s 2001 song from the album Blue Boytells this familiar story from the point of view of a mum in an abusive relationship, breaking the cycle of “first he’d be sweet to her and talk for hours/then lay right into her, and buy her flowers.”

It’s interesting that the cheap hotel, the refuge to which she takes her children when her husband steps out, is looked upon as both a blessing and a curse; that she is both glad to leave and hates to leave at the same time. As with most things, the emotions involved are not black and white. Leaving a bad situation and starting again leaves a lot of room for improvement. But in this song, there is a lot of uncertainty too along with the sense of empowerment that goes along with saying enough is enough; “god bless” and “goddamn” the cheap hotel are on equal footing here. Sexsmith leaves enough space in his song not to judge this one way or another, being as he is one of the best songwriters working today.

When in a relationship that one knows is ultimately unsalvageable, one thing which often happens is the need to carry on regardless, to continue to slog through because feelings and attachment outweigh the sense of inevitability. In other words, denial is not just a river in Egypt when it comes to breaking up. Beck’s “Lonesome Tears” is about getting out of this cycle, to realize that the energy spent on a relationship which is doing more harm than good is wasted, ‘riding farther than I should, just to meet you there’. This could very well be an angry song, a song of defiance. Yet, it’s ultimately sad, filled with the narrator’s love of another, yet with the knowledge that such a love will cost too much to both.

The 2002 album Sea Change, which Beck released to follow up his more celebratory and more carnal Midnite Vultures, is an understated affair in many ways in the singer-songwriter tradition. Traces of his trademark irony are entirely gone, and this is perhaps the most striking thing about it. In “Lonesome Tears” particularly, we get the sense that his songwriting is meant to be an emotional release after a breakup of his own, an approach that he’d not engaged in fully before.

Sometimes a break up happens in a matter of hours as opposed to a matter of years. And this being the case, there are songs which give voice to the scoundrel, to the good-natured rogue, to the one who isn’t interested in holding hands and talking about “little plans” with would-be life partners. Australian group Jet cover this territory well with ‘Cold Hard B*tch’, an anthem for the scramble-out-of-bed-before-she-wakes-up set. They took a lot of heat when the song came out, because I think a lot of people assumed that the CHB in question was supposed to be the woman in the picture. I personally think it’s about the man, making his paltry excuses and running out the door – that’s cold.

To me this song is about poorly communicated expectations. For the guy in this song, “she was shakin’ her hips/that was all that I need”. Yet, for the woman in this particular song it’s all about “holding hands and talking about little plans”. So many hearts are broken over this kind miscommunication. But for loud, testosterone-fueled rock anthems, this is fa song to inspire the ripping up of seats everywhere, with the voice of the commitment-phobic leading the charge.

Break-ups can take a long time to get over. But sometimes, it works the other way too, that once things are settled, the other person seems like someone you dreamed about, not someone who you were tied to in real life. When you meet the person randomly years later, there is no murmur of heartache so much as a feeling of strangeness, as if a character from one novel shows up in another novel, turning the overall story which might have been a tragedy into something that more closely resembles a comedy. In “You r Ex-lover is Dead” by Stars off of their albumSet Yourself On Fire, there is a feeling of bemusement in meeting an old flame, with the feelings of regret supplanted by a detached sense that one was never really touched by the other person in the first place. This is a song that reminds the listener that sometimes a relationship is very much of its time, that it has no place beyond its own ending.

The most powerful line to me in this song is “I’m not sorry I met you/I’m not sorry it’s over/I’m not sorry that there’s nothing to save.” In many ways, this brings us full circle to ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me”, although this kind of resolution is less celebratory, and contains a more clinical view of one’s romantic history. And yet the sense of resolution is the same. And resolution is really what we’re all after, post break-up. So, this is a hopeful view of a break-up too then, knowing that if time doesn’t necessarily heal all wounds, it certainly gives new perspectives in that what is important at one time may not apply in another.

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Break-ups; a human experience that not many of us enjoy when we’re the ones being dumped. To be fair, even the dumpers have a hard time with it. And like most common human experiences, popular song has them well covered, in all of their complexities, giving voice to the vulnerable and the callous in equal measure. In some ways, making art or appreciating it can add all manner of value to one’s life, particularly in times when we need to be reminded that what we’re going through is common. Songs – lyrics that resonate, melodies that keep us company by playing in our heads – help to remind us that we’re not alone in the times where we feel that we are. And what is a more basic human need than that?